Shadows no. 4: belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance
Comments:
Bain Mullins
Felipe Othick
Reference:
Hsu, Aurie and Kemper, Steven. Shadows no. 4: belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance. CHI EA 2010. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1760000/1753929/p3117-hsu.pdf?key1=1753929&key2=7507917921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=8252508&CFTOKEN=84510896
Summary:
Hsu and Kemper explain the Shadows no. 4 system. This is a mix of belly dancing and interactive electroacoustic musical performance. They did this by using a wireless sensor network on dancers in order to track movements and gestures of the dancers. These sensors are small and light as they are able to be sewn into the garments of the dancers as to not limit the dancers movements. These wireless sensors translate the dancers gestures into variations in the music through beats and rhythms. The sensors themselves are LilyPad sensors. These pick up on variations of flex, FSR, vibration, and acceleration. The wireless capability started out as Bluetooth but the range and connectivity is limited. They switched to 1mW Xbee modules to correct this shortcoming.
The future design goals are to refine the sensor network in possibly biosensors and/or motion capture.
Discussion:
This article didn't describe much of how the variations of music actually came about, but it seems that it is suppose to give more of a complete feel to the whole experience of watching the dancers. I took a wireless networks class that focussed on wireless sensor networks so it was interesting to me to read a paper focusing on this topic. It is a powerful technology, but it doesn't seem like it was used to its full potential in this paper. With more and different sensors, it could pick up on the body temperature of the dancers, and it seems like the motion capture could already be possible (just not explored by them). This paper reminds me of the Dance.Draw system.
You're right. There's a whole lot more these researchers could do, which is partly what makes this research so interesting to me. I'm curious to see if they'll ever have it set up so several dancers can dance together and have the music they create work in a kind of harmonic fashion.
ReplyDeleteThis paper also reminded of Dance.Draw, and I also think that their future improvements will in fact use techniques used by Dr. Latulipe.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is interesting how we are trying to move away from having people playing along with dancers. Similar to the Dance.Draw, it seems like we are trying to automate as much as possible. I don't know how much I like it though.
ReplyDelete